I recently purchased the linuxformat magasine "getting started with Mandriva" which came with cover disks to install Mandrive Linux (exclusive to WH Smith).

I have tried installing today on an old PC with a clean hard disk and AMD 500 processor (socket A).

When I boot up using the disk 1 CD rom and press f1 to start I enter a text based set up program which is different from the screen shots shown in the magasine; the pictures in the magasine show a gui based set up process.

[quote="mugstar"]How much RAM is there in this old PC? There is a minimum requirement to run the GUI installer, although I canIts an old PC running an AMD500 chip with 393MB RAM I think. Its an old graphics card, Virage 4MB I think - maybe that does not meet the min requirement to run the graphical installer??

Its an old AMD500 processor with 393MB RAM. The graphics card is an old VIRAGE one, 4MB RAM on board I think. Maybe this is why the gui will not run??? Do you know what the min requirement is for the gui installer to run??

The text based installer may look different to the screenshots, but the options are identical. Even if the installer can run on your hardware, there's no reason to think the desktop won't. I'd just proceed with the installation in text mode, making sure the graphical desktop is configured during installation.

This problem isn't limited to Mandriva, I couldn't get the SUSE 9.2 installer to run graphically on my VMWare setup, but the installed system had no problems.

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." (Albert Einstein)